Each day, carbon dioxide emitted by Georgia Power’s coal, oil and gas plants is released into the atmosphere, where it will stay for hundreds of years and heat the planet. Last year, the utility quietly took steps to explore an alternative. Contractors hired by Georgia Power drilled holes into the Earth’s crust at three locations in rural Georgia, some more than a mile deep. Their goal? To see whether the formations below are suitable for “geologic carbon sequestration,” a method that could permanently lock away the company’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

Carbon capture and storage technology has its detractors, and significant environmental and cost questions around it exist. But major scientific reports have found it may be necessary to limit global warming. 

Felix Herrmann, a computational seismologist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Computational Science and Engineering, agrees. 

“It’s not a silver bullet,” Herrmann said. “But the reason why I’m an advocate for this, frankly, is I think it’s a bit naive to think we can switch off of oil and gas tomorrow.”

Atlanta Journal Constitution

A powerful 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula late Monday, triggering a tsunami that surged across the Pacific Ocean. Tsunami alerts stretched from Japan to South America, including portions of coastal Alaska and the West Coast, as well as Hawaii.

“This is certainly one of the biggest earthquakes we’ve seen recently,” said Andrew Newman, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “It’s smaller than the 2011 Japan quake, but it's almost the exact same size as the Chile earthquake in 2010. It created a lot of local damage there as well as a large tsunami.”

The quake occurred along a megathrust fault, which is a type of subduction zone where one tectonic plate dives beneath another. These faults, common around the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” are responsible for the largest earthquakes in recorded history. They're also responsible for generating tsunami waves. 

"In these megathrust faults, one dives beneath another. It's actually that upper plate when it pops up," Newnan said. "It creates really large waves. That part that pops up may pop up as much as 10 to 15 or 20 feet, depending on how big the earthquake is. That's going to lift the entire water column around it...and then that wave just kind of propagates away."

11Alive News

On July 1, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) detected what was first believed to be an asteroid. As calculations for its orbit progressed, it was found to be from outside our solar system, only the third interstellar object ever detected.

[One] thing that astronomers discovered early on was that, rather than being an asteroid, the interstellar interloper dubbed 3I/ATLAS was a comet.

"It is doing things that we expect comets to do. It's producing the types of gasses that we see comets produce. It's got a coma and a tail now pointed in the expected direction," said James Wray, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "I would say the short summary is it looks generally like a comet. But in detail, there are some intriguing differences from solar system comets."

CBC Lite

A team of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences found some answers to the mystery of gene regulation by turning to the trusty roundworm C. elegans, a frequently studied model organism that has contributed to many important discoveries. In their new study published in GENETICS, the researchers used a powerful new approach to compare gene activity across several types of wildly diverse worm strains from all over the world to uncover their regulatory structure.

In this first of its kind study, the researchers crossed each strain of worm with their standard N2 lab strain to make a hybrid offspring. They then used a modern and powerful technique called allele-specific RNA sequencing to determine how the genes were being used in these new strains, and which parent DNA is driving the gene’s activity.

Genes to Genomes

In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, Georgia Tech physical oceanographer Susan Lozier and researcher Yao Fu shed light on the shifting dynamics of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Their findings, produced in collaboration with an international team of scientists, reveal shifts across surface and deep ocean currents, with implications for climate prediction and ocean heat transport. This research underscores the importance of sustained observational efforts in understanding long-term ocean variability.

Geophysical Research Letters